A Lightweight and Robust User Authentication Protocol with User Anonymity for IoT-Based Healthcare

With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), the word “intelligent medical care” has increasingly become a major vision. Intelligent medicine adopts the most advanced IoT technology to realize the interaction between patients and people, medical institutions, and medical equipment. However, with the openness of network transmission, the security and privacy of information transmission have become a major problem. Recently, Masud et al. proposed a lightweight anonymous user authentication protocol for IoT medical treatment, claiming that their method can resist various attacks. However, through analysis of the protocol, we observed that their protocol cannot effectively resist privileged internal attacks, sensor node capture attacks, and stolen authentication attacks, and their protocol does not have perfect forward security. Therefore, we propose a new protocol to resolve the security vulnerabilities in Masud’s protocol and remove some redundant parameters, so as to make the protocol more compact and secure. In addition, we evaluate the security and performance of the new protocol and prove that the overall performance of the new protocol is better than that of other related protocols.